…Baluyev
went to a covered platform. Rimy, all in frosty patterns, windows were
statedly lit up by fires of sliding-by stations and halts, railway-crossings'
semaphores and headlights of chunking cars, kicking up their heels in a
queue. That time, it usually darkened early, and not everybody had managed
to reach the destination. Baluyev put his palm to the window, then rubbed
it by his thumb and, as somewhen at his childhood, warmed a small, on a
short period of time transparent, circle with rough edges. Trying not to
breathe on the window, he looked through that tiny viewport, but saw nothing,
except for hirsute fir-trees, covered by snow, and impassable snowdrifts.
The warmed space was thickening fast, skimming over with a film and then
with frosty streaks and, receiving nothing new from already frozen and
totally reddened fingers, obstinately came back to its first impenetrable
condition. As soon as the frost had its hour, and the window into the world
slammed down, there – outside –
an invisible unknown station, all on fires, slid by, and one could only
hear an alarm bell pealing and a loud-speaker announcing something. Baluyev
knew that an hour and a quarter ago, here, the train, where there was her,
slid by, brattling in the same way. And that she, if not being asleep,
managed to notice from her compartment's window the station's building,
and people on the platform, a duty officer in a red forage cap, and a sad
sailor in a sailor's cap, a saleswoman of cooled down pies, an invalid
on a carriage, and something else, which was not seen. And a captain in
baldric and belts at a station restaurant's small table, he, who she, certainly,
could not see, having turned to a window in the same way as he was doing
now, was gazing after flitting, brightly lit-up windows of cars. The pack
of "Kazbek", which dropped out of his overcoat's pocket right in a deep
wayside snowdrift, when the captain slipped down on a well-trodden turn
on the way to the station, failed in drying out enough, and then –
when there was her train – one more
cigarette died out just like it did now, while he was still looked at already
empty railways following cars, disappeared behind the turn. The carafe
was already half empty, and the ashtray, not changed for a long time, was
full of crushed stubs.

…The
train entered a long turn (to the north-west –
Baluyev thought), its wheels frequently clattered on junctions, and it
appreciably turned to the right. Feeling that he already began to freeze,
Baluyev came back to his compartment. His cheerful fellow traveller, who
had invited Baluyev to the dining-car with himself, and who, for certain,
had found somebody there, was still absent, and Baluyev was glad at it.
Her train left her far-off city late at night on the eve, while the Baluyev's
train had been on the road no more than seven hours, and already for almost
two hours, their trains had been running on the same gauge, and were to
arrive the next day in the morning at the two neighboring stations of the
same city at the bank of a wide northern river with polyfoil bridges and
silent channels, cobbled streets, and yards' wells. She was faster than
him in an hour and a quarter. And therefore, everything Baluyev could see
now from his compartment's not frozen window, was her: and that forest,
hardly seen through the dark, and already invisible fields, small houses
in halts, stations and terminals –
those ones, which slid by behind the window, and those, rare ones, where
the train stopped, all that still had her look, which warmth heated Baluyev,
when he went out to a next, totally frozen platform. She was everywhere.
It even seemed to Baluyev, or no –
he was sure that through trains' smoke and spring greasing's smell, gage,
all possible food, canvas covers, freshly shined boots, and all the rest,
he clearly felt her smell, which Baluyev could not compare to anything,
and could not confuse; he only knew that it made his heart beating more
often, and his breath became rough.

…His
companion was still absent. Baluyev started to bed. Getting asleep, he
saw how early in the dark morning the next day she would step on the frozen
platform, covered by station smoke's volumes, how she would go on the city's
streets, where there would not be him yet, and how she would be alone there,
in that city, and the city would be with her, but there would not be Baluyev
there, how his train would arrive then, and in the city, there would be
two of them, but they would not be together yet, and how, at last, in some
sweetly painful hours, they would meet in the prior agreed place…

…The
captain finished smoking and left the table. His train was getting ready
to leave soon. He took from a hanger his, with artillery armbands overcoat,
forage cap… but suddenly, the door opened with noise, and she almost rushed
into the hall. Her coat was half opened, strands of her hair were peeping
out from under her hat, and she was panting. The hall was not big, and
she saw the captain at once. …They were standing and looking at each other
with the sight, which would at once make everybody understand that only
people, who had not seen each other for a long time, but who needed to
be together to make their life absolutely well, could look in that way.